ASHKHABAD, December 30 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - An opposition leader in Turkmenistan was sentenced to life in jail Monday, December 30, for plotting to kill the president of the Central Asian republic, as human rights groups decried the trial as a pretext to wipe out enemies of the regime.

Former deputy Prime Minister Boris Shikhmuradov was arrested following a November 25 attempt on the life of President Saparmurat Niyazov, who rules the isolated former Soviet republic with an iron fist and a North Korean-style personality cult, Agence France-Presse (AFP) reported.

Shikhmuradov will serve five years in prison and the next 20 years of his sentence in a labor camp, according to the court ruling read out at a televised session of the national council.

President Niyazov immediately proposed changing the country’s constitution, which limits jail terms to a maximum of 25 years, so Shikhmuradov and his accomplices could serve life sentences.

The 3,000 or so members of the people’s council, which includes lawmakers, politicians and other representatives, unanimously raised their hands in consent.

Shikhmuradov was shown on television Sunday, December 29, with a puffy face, saying in slurred tones he had plotted to kill the president while under the influence of drugs.

“We committed this act with the aim of killing the Turkmen president, ruining the government and changing the constitutional order,” he said.

The court also handed down 25-year sentences, commuted to life in prison upon Niyazov’s proposal, to two detained businessmen and two exiled opposition leaders found guilty of orchestrating the assassination attempt.

“We are a group of criminals, mafia. There isn’t a single decent person among us, we are all thugs,” Shikhmuradov said in his televised remarks.

However, in a statement posted last week on the Turkmen opposition’s official website, Shikhmuradov said he had turned himself in to end the mass arrests which followed the attack and admitted to nothing more than trying to organize mass demonstrations against Niyazov’s rule.

Niyazov, who has declared himself president for life of the energy-rich state, escaped unhurt when gunmen opened fire on his motorcade, and has since launched a fierce police crackdown against his few political opponents whom he accused of plotting the assassination attempt.

Other top opponents to Turkmenbashi - “the father of all Turkmens”, as the president prefers to be called - have denied all charges of involvement.

Analysts in Moscow suggest Niyazov, who refuses regular contacts with the outside world, may have staged the attack himself as a pretext to arrest potential enemies.

“His confessions, the ‘people’s’ protests asking for the death penalty for Shikhmuradov - it’s too reminiscent of the 1937 trials against the ‘enemies of the people’ in the USSR,” said Alexey Malachenko of the Carnegie Foundation.

“The Turkmen who go out into the street asking to cut off the arms and legs of the suspected perpetrators of the attack are obliged to do so, they’re not seen as guilty and declared accomplices,” said Anatoly Fomin of the Turkmen human rights group Helsinki.